No, Donald Trump didn’t lose the popular vote

As more votes have been counted in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump’s margin of victory has slimmed. This has led some social media users to falsely claim that Trump lost the popular vote entirely.

“Donald Trump is losing the popular vote by 2% and only won because of the electoral college means that he is a DEI president,” a Nov 24 Threads post reads.

The user who wrote the post shared a screenshot from a New York magazine article in a second post that said, “Trump did not win a majority of the national popular vote. Though it looked like he was over 50% percent on Election Night, the steady drip of late ballots has eroded his percentage to (currently) 49.87 percent.”

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

It’s true that Trump’s share of the popular vote has decreased since election night, but he didn’t lose the popular vote by 2%.

Results from the day after the election showed Trump winning the popular vote by about 3%, with about 50.9%. As of Nov. 25, with more ballots counted, Trump had about 49.9% of the popular vote while Vice President Kamala Harris received 48.3%. Although Trump didn’t win the majority of the popular vote, he still beat Harris by about 1.6%.

Trump said Nov. 6 his victory was “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” PolitiFact reported that “Trump’s  margins — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards.”

We rate the claim that Trump lost the popular vote by 2% False.